18 Lisa Kron on Memory, Meaning and the Collective Power of Theater

Well known for her Tony Award-winning play, Fun Home, Lisa Kron is a remarkable playwright and performer whose work reflects and refracts these complex times. Her storytelling straddles the blurry line between fact and fiction, memory and invention, the political and the deeply personal. Lisa Kron developed her craft at New York City’s WOW Cafe, which began as an international women’s theater festival in 1980. During her time at WOW Café, she honed her creative voice, culminating in her breakthrough one-woman show, 101 Humiliating Stories. Her gift for mining humor and meaning from complex family dynamics yielded her next two rave-reviewed plays: Well and 2.5 Mile Ride, which explored her relationship with her mother and father respectively. Her greatest creative challenge arrived in the form of Fun Home, a musical adaptation of Allison Bechdel’s graphic novel about coming out while coming of age. Fun Home took Lisa seven years to complete and went on to earn her Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In this episode, Lisa and ArtCenter President Lorne Buchman discuss the contours of her career in theater, the delicate process of dramatizing personal material and her passion for the collective power of performance. Learn more about Lisa's work:  https://www.lisakron.org http://funhomebroadway.com  http://www.wowcafe.org http://www.wellonbroadway.com https://www.dramaticpublishing.com/2-5-minute-ride  Learn more about this episode of Change Lab at www.artcenter.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices